The statistical bludgeon

In the dark ages literacy was a secret jealously guarded
by the senior clerics. It gave them power in the monopoly of handing down the
written and immutable law; and, incidentally, enabled them to conceal their
errors (and perversions) of interpretation. The lower clergy were only able to
copy documents as arrays of symbols without intrinsic meaning, but God-given,
and their errors propagated (such as confusing the Gothic long “s” with “f”).

In these days of almost universal literacy (of sorts) there
is an analogy in the case of statistical literacy, though not one to be taken
too far. The senior clergy understand statistics (to a patchy extent) and use or
abuse them at will. The junior clergy put in numbers and extract them from
computer packages, without understanding, and pass them on. The laity know their
place, but are impressed.

Uncertainty is not an easy concept to accept. You are
accustomed to getting your exercise book back from the teacher, with a tick
against the sums that are right and a cross against the ones that are wrong.
When someone tells you that there is a ninety percent probability that the
answer is A and a ten percent probability that it is B, it is a bridge too far
for many. They are grateful when an authority (say the EPA) saves them from
crossing this pons asinorum by asserting that 90% = right and 10%=wrong.
Therein lies a tale of grand deceit and devilry. The uncertainty has been
removed at the cost of understanding.

Just as the mediaeval clergy used their own privileged
interpretations of the written laws to bludgeon the laity into conformity, so
the modern numerical necromancers use their interpretations of numbers to the
same end. In both cases the penalty for indiscipline is the threat of
pestilence, hell-fire and damnation; while the cost of conformity is a simple
but substantial tithe on your income.

Who are they?

What motivates people to put so much effort into misleading
their fellow beings? It is the usual suspects – money, power, fame and zealotry,
often in combination.

You could write not just a book but a whole set of
encyclopaedias on the statistical abuses carried out by the global warming
industry. Globally it is a trillion dollar business, many people (some notorious
but most invisible) making themselves multi-millionaires from its manifold
branches. It is justified by reference to an alleged consensus, a word that is
foreign to scientific argument. The cost is borne by ordinary people, be they
Africans locked into primitive and unhealthy life styles or Europeans thrust
into fuel poverty by onerous stealth taxes. It also provides a power base for
ambitious politicians and bureaucrats. There are virtually no dissenters among
the ruling political classes, though there are growing numbers in the general
populations.

But the reach of statistical abuse goes way beyond that
single issue. Politicians obsessed with targets and league tables are not only
distorting the things they purport to measure: they are making the dishonest
manipulation of numbers part of the every day work of people in management
positions. They are even torturing and killing people in such areas as Britain’s
largest industry, its National Health Service, sacrificing them to the gods of
targets.

Bureaucrats are great exponents of the abuse of numbers.
The SI system of units was one of the most beneficial inventions of the
twentieth century, yet it was brought into public disrepute by over-zealous
British officials, who used the law to enforce
the use of kilograms by the “metric
martyrs” (when you could still buy produce by the livre in French open
markets). That is just a facile and obvious example, but there are many more
complicated ones. Every party out of power promises to simplify the tax system,
but in power they do exactly the opposite. A most egregious example is the
withdrawal of child support by Britain’s Coalition Government from couples in
which just one partner earns above a certain threshold. But what constitutes a
couple? Are they married or unmarried; cohabiting or living apart; different sex
or same sex; copulating or non-copulating; part of a ménage à trois;
joined or separated in their finances and banking; landlord and tenant or joint
owners? A fine playground for bureaucrats, but you could almost feel sorry for
the revenue men. They are universally hated, for there is nothing more fearful
than the combination of power and incompetence. Everyone has a story to tell;
yet much of the blame is with politicians who are incapable of thinking things
through, but you can confidently predict that they will produce the statistics
to prove the success of their legislation.

Journalists are also great traders in junk statistics. A
large portion of the modern newspaper is formed by the fillers, small columns of
type comprising barely edited press releases from epidemiologists and cod
psychologists, usually giving the insignificant results of small ill-controlled
studies but with dramaticised headlines. The stories are virtually identical,
word for word in several papers. Every now and then a story merits the big
treatment, if it is deemed to affect readers personally or conjures a scary
headline, but the nature is the same and investigative journalism notable by its
absence.

Many people are even confused by simple percentages and
graphs, which make them open to exploitation by activists and zealots, and some
of those gullible people are journalists, politicians and bureaucrats. Below is
a discussion of some of the trends and consequences of statistical bludgeoning,
in no particular order.

Deliberate fraud

Much of the dissemination of misinformation is relatively
innocent, people dabbling in something they do not quite understand and
motivated by personal ambition. Some of it is less so and knowingly false. At
the extreme, however, there are practices that are intended to achieve
non-scientific aims by coldly calculated deception under the cloak of corrupt
science.

It is fairly safe to assume, for example, that anything
coming out of the USA EPA is fraudulent. Ever since their first and greatest
coup, the “metastudy” on environmental tobacco smoke (involving at least
five gross statistical frauds), was embraced by authoritarian politicians,
they have been given carte blanche to ignore the methods and laws of
science. They ruthlessly exploit this licence for purely political ends.

The EPA does not now even bother with generation of
fraudulent statistics: it makes ex-cathedra pronouncements that defy the
laws of science. For example: anything they arbitrarily choose to declare as a
poison kills with no lower limit of dosage, contrary to the first law of
toxicology (that the poison is in the dose).

The EPA has evolved into a congress-bypass operation,
enabling an administration with water melon tendencies to mount attacks on essential indigenous industries, such as energy.
It is virtually unmonitored in its activities, yet disposes of nearly ten billion
dollars of taxpayers’ money annually. A fine and trenchant essay by
Henry I Miller on Investing in bad science includes the remark:

“For some reason I was
favored with periodic reports of the research funded by the
epa. The overwhelming majority of
it was shoddy, irrelevant, and unpublishable.”

which just about sums it up.

The abandonment of causality

One of the immutable laws of experimental statistics was
correlation is not causation. Thus in sound science, in addition to
correlation, you have to provide a plausible mechanism linking putative cause to
effect before a hypothesis can even be considered. This requirement is openly
contested and defied by prominent epidemiologists.

Here is the sort of fictional form of causation you can
create by ignoring the law:

Over decades, the exposure
to tobacco smoke continually decreased, while the rate of childhood asthma
increased. Therefore tobacco smoke is a preventative for asthma.

That is, of course, a deliberately facetious construction,
but who knows? It might even be true.

The one in twenty lottery accepted as the norm

Statistical significance normally has two components,
the relative risk (RR) and the
probability (P) that the result occurred by pure accident. The acceptable
limits chosen for these measures in epidemiology and related fields were from
the outset regarded as very lax by traditional scientists. In particular, the
limit P=0.05, now almost universal in epidemiology, means that there is a one in
twenty chance that the result is by accident. If there are a hundred such
results in an issue of an epidemiological journal, then by their own admission
five of them are completely wrong. It is, however, worse than that. The
provenance of P and RR depends on the maintenance of strict conditions (large,
blind, randomised, controlled trials etc.). More often than not epidemiological
and psychological claims are based on small, ill-controlled observational
studies, making them essentially worthless. So why do they persist with this
charade? Well, there are simply not nearly enough “discoveries” available to
justify the numbers of people employed in the epidemiological scare industry,
including publishers of journals, so they have to keep the mouth of the net
wide. In consequence, most people now believe that the “scientists” are always
contradicting each other, whereby the whole of science is tainted in the public
eye. By sheer weight of repetition they have established that their style of
lottery is “normal”. It is no more normal than swine jumping over a cliff. The
widespread smoking ban was justified by the EPA’s one in ten lottery, an
all-time low in standards.

Each enormity justifies the next

Anything hated by a zealot group is subject to campaigns
for total ban, but sometimes the motivation is nothing more than a bid for fame
by a group of “scientists”. The withdrawal of vioxx, on the basis of a
statistical blunder, is used to provide justification of other proposed
bans, such as that of diclofenac,
on marginal statistical grounds. This is not to say that there is no relation
between the drug and heart disease: it is to say that there is no significant
evidence either way, and certainly not enough to constrain clinical judgement.

Take it from one who knows, severe arthritic pain is
absolute hell. Many sufferers were bereft when their vioxx was taken away, as
more will be if the same happens to diclofenac. No ingested substance has just
one effect on one part of the body: everything has side effects. Keep the
clinicians informed and let them make the decisions.

Playing favourites

Just as some treatments and substances come under attack,
either arbitrarily or from pure malignance, so the mirror image occurs. There
are others that are treated as holy relics and to question them is to commit
sacrilege.

Statins provide a curious example. Many clinicians state
categorically that they have no serious side effects, while others campaign for
the compulsory dosing of the whole population above a certain age. Anecdotally,
however, there are strong indications of serious and unpleasant side-effects,
but public funding of research into them is
largely denied.

On reviewing
the book that exploded the whole cholesterol myth, over a decade ago,
I remarked that “It is a scientific tour de force, for which he will, no
doubt, be dismissed as a crank. It says much of the state of the modern world
when those who adhere to the scientific method are cranks, while those who flout
it win Nobel prizes.” I was wrong. He was not dismissed as a crank, he was just
ignored.

The cholesterol/statin myths are an offshoot of the
political anti-obesity campaign. Excess body fat is unaesthetic and it is now
considered acceptable to medicalise any behaviour of which we do not approve.
This has created a bandwagon upon which various interest groups (such as
militant vegetarians) have scrambled. Cholesterols are vital substances,
absolutely essential to a wide range of structures and processes in the animal
body, they are synthesised in the cells, but also obtained somewhat
inefficiently from dietary animal fat. There is a consensus (that unscientific
word again) that there is a link between cholesterol and atherosclerosis, but
there is also a small active
international group of sceptics that questions this assumption. Whatever the
truth of either view there is no question that (as in other fields) the
existence of a consensus suppresses research into alternative hypotheses.

Any graph will do

In the popular mind the graph has been elevated to the
status of a religious icon. If there is a graph it must be right. Apart from the
fact that a graph is vulnerable to the sort of deceptive manipulation that we
have labelled chartmanship, its contribution to the argument can be misleading
or even completely irrelevant. A choice example occurred when the salt zealots
were challenged to produce evidence for their death-laden claims.
They came up with this.

A few thoughts occur immediately:

·First and foremost, the graph has nothing to do with a putative
relationship between dietary sodium and death, which is the nub of the claim.

·Small scale studies are worthless (and some here are very
small). Combining them by the dubious process of the meta-analysis does not
improve matters and introduces other biases (e.g. publication bias).

·Not only are ordinary readers confused by graphs: as the
vioxx
case shows, even self-styled scientists cannot interpret their own visual
results.

·Last and hindmost, what were these scatter diagrams supposed to
demonstrate? Damned if I know.

Opportunism

The statistical bigots are ever watchful for “evidence” to
promote their causes. In particular they monitor the numbers so that they can
publicise any accidental correlations that go in the “right” direction, while
ignoring those that go in the “wrong” one. This activity is at its highest
around one of their “coups”; for the march of the zealots must be ever forward,
with no reversion.

Thus there is constant selective mining of “before and
after events” relative to the smoking ban, which are celebrated by the
establishment media. During the writing of this piece there was
childhood asthma in January 2013. Then, even more bizarrely there was
Premature birth in February.

In the fifties, none of my many childhood friends at school
or in my neighbourhood had witnessed asthma or its symptoms. I was able to
demonstrate wheezing to them, which I could trigger by drinking a small quantity
of lemon barley water, and it became a sort of party piece. We were constantly
exposed to tobacco smoke everywhere, especially in enclosed spaces like cinemas.
Now I see many children climbing onto the school bus clutching their Ventolin
inhalers and wonder why there seems to be so little interest in finding out why.

Discussion

In the modern age almost everything is political; not just
party-political, but also driven by sometimes covert, extra-parliamentary
interest groups.

Science has come under total political control and so has
lost much of its raison d’être, which is human curiosity. In common
parlance the very word “science” has changed its meaning. A repeated observation
is that the existence of a consensus (a concept alien to science) in any field
results in the suppression of research into alternative hypotheses. Politicians
and bureaucrats nurture research that confirms their prejudices. That promotes a
consensus, which inevitably becomes self-reinforcing by the exclusion of
alternatives, so alleged scientific progress becomes merely the expression of
Government policy.

The EU, USA, Britain and Australia all have left-leaning,
authoritarian governments and bureaucracies, who believe it is their right and
duty to exercise control over every detail of their victims’ lives. Powerful
monolithic media organisations, such as the BBC and ABC, ruthlessly exercise
rigorous censorship and selectivity to magnify the apparent weight of zealot
causes favoured by the contemporary establishment. Scientific matters are
discussed in terms of political ideology rather than the natural language of
science, which is predominantly mathematics.

The looseness of trendy modern statistical procedures
provides a ready response to political requirements. Results can be virtually
manufactured to order. These are then used, with the cooperation of the
establishment media, to bludgeon the population into obedience.